It is easier to create the effect because the effect depends totally upon you; the cause may not be so dependent on you.

I will tell you one of the deepest laws of life. You may not have thought about it at all. You have heard – the whole of science depends on it – that cause and effect is the base. You create the cause and the effect follows. Life is a causal link. You put the seed in the soil and it will sprout. If the cause is there, then the tree will follow. The fire is there: you put your hand in it and it will burn. The cause is there and the effect will follow. You take poison and you will die. You arrange for the cause and then the effect follows.

This is one of the most basic scientific laws, that cause and effect is the innermost link of all processes of life. Religion knows about a second law which is still deeper than this. But the second law which is deeper than this will look absurd if you don’t know it and don’t experiment with it.

We have learned down the ages a subtle mechanism: to repress happiness and to express misery. It has become our second nature.

There are reasons. Just look into your misery, watch, and you will be able to find what the reasons are. Then look into those moments when once in a while you allow yourself the joy of being in joy, and then see what differences are there. These will be the few things….

When you are miserable you are a conformist.

Society loves it, people respect you, you have great respectability, you can even become a saint; hence your saints are all miserable. The misery is written large on their faces, in their eyes. Because they are miserable they are against all joy. They condemn all joy as hedonism; they condemn every possibility of joy as sin. They are miserable, and they would like to see the whole world miserable. In fact only in a miserable world can they be thought to be saints. In a happy world they would have to be hospitalized, mentally treated. They are pathological.

Love is risky. To love is to move into danger-because you cannot control it, it is not safe. It is not within your hands. It is unpredictable.

Somehow, from the very childhood, we are being crippled. Our roots with the heart are cut. We are forced towards the head and we are not allowed to move towards the heart. It is something humanity has suffered for long, a calamity-that man has not yet become capable of living with love.

There are reasons:
Love is risky. To love is to move into danger-because you cannot control it, it is not safe. It is not within your hands. It is unpredictable: where it will lead nobody knows. Whether it will lead anywhere, that too nobody knows. One is moving into utter darkness but roots grow only in darkness. If the roots of a tree become afraid of darkness and don’t move underground, the tree will die. They have to move into darkness. They have to find their way towards the deepest layers of the earth where they can find sources of water, nourishment.

If you can float between being angry and being sad, both become similarly easy. You will have a transcendence and then you will be able to watch, and escape.

Anger and sadness are both the same. Sadness is passive anger and anger is active sadness. Because sadness comes easy, anger seems to be difficult. Because you are too much in tune with the passive.

It is difficult for a sad person to be angry. If you can make a sad person angry, his sadness will disappear immediately. It will be very difficult for an angry person to be sad. If you can make him sad, his anger will disappear immediately.

In all our emotions the basic polarity continues — of man and woman, yin and yang, the male and the female. Anger is male, sadness is female. So if you are in tune with sadness, it is difficult to shift to anger, but I would like you to shift. Just exploding it within won’t help much because again you are seeking some way of being passive. No. Bring it out, act it out. Even if it looks nonsense, then too. Be a buffoon in your own eyes, but bring it out.

Misery nourishes your ego; happiness is basically a state of egolessness. That is the very crux of the problem. That’s why people find it very difficult to be happy.

Misery has many things to give to you which happiness cannot give. On the contrary, happiness takes away many things from you. Happiness takes all that you have ever had, all that you have ever been; happiness destroys you.

Misery nourishes your ego, and happiness is basically a state of egolessness. That is the problem, the very crux of the problem. That’s why people find it very difficult to be happy.

That’s why millions of people in the world have to live in misery, have decided to live in misery. It gives you a very, very crystallized ego. Miserable, you are. Happy, you are not. In misery: crystallization; in happiness you become diffused.

If this is understood then things become very clear. Misery makes you special. Happiness is a universal phenomenon, there is nothing special about it. Trees are happy and animals are happy and birds are happy. The whole existence is happy, except man. Being miserable, man becomes very special, extraordinary.

I’m experiencing difficulty in maintaining a relationship as well as meditating and moving deeper into my inner world.

When you move on an inner pilgrimage, the energies turn inwards, the same energies that were moving outwards, and suddenly you find yourself alone like an island. The difficulty arises because you are not really interested in being yourself, and all relationships look like a dependence, a bondage. But this is a passing phase; don’t make it a permanent attitude. Sooner or later when you are settled inside again, you will be overflowing with energy and will want to move into a relationship again.

So for the first time that mind becomes meditative, love appears to be like a bondage. And in a way it is true because a mind that is not meditative cannot really be in love.

That love is false, illusory; more of an infatuation, less like love. But you have nothing to compare it with unless the real happens, so when meditation starts, the illusory love by and by dissipates, disappears. Don’t be disheartened, one thing. And the second thing, don’t make it a permanent attitude; these are two possibilities.

Don’t be afraid, move deeper. The more relaxed you become, the more possibility there is to enter into a relationship deeply. Go deeper. Nobody is hindering the path.

(A Rendezvous with Osho)

There is a fear about the girl I am with. I am afraid to lose her…and that won’t allow me to have a deep relationship. Maybe I’m afraid to be alone, something like that.

No, don’t be afraid, move deeper. It will happen because the more you become centered, the more relaxed you become, the more possibility there is to enter into a relationship deeply.

In fact it is you who goes into a relationship. If you are not there, tense, crippled, worried and fragmented, who is going to go deep? Because of our fragmentedness, we are really afraid of getting deeper into a relationship, into deep layers, because then our reality will be revealed. Then you will have to open your heart, and your heart is just fragments. There is not one man inside you – you are a crowd. If you really love a woman and you open your heart, she will think you are a public, not a person – that is the fear.

But once and for all understand that every problem is yours, so it has to be solved in your privacy.

Remember not to misunderstand me. I have said, “Express your negative emotions;” I have not said, “Publicly.” That’s how things become distorted.

Now if you are feeling angry with someone and you start expressing your anger, the other person is not going to be a Gautam Buddha and sit silently. He is not a marble statue; he will also do something. You will express anger, he will express anger.

It will create more anger in you — and anger or violence create, from the other side, the same, and with a vengeance. And then you will feel like being more into it, because you have been told to express.

If you are feeling angry, go to your room, close off the room, beat the pillow, stand before a mirror, shout at your own image, say things that you have never said to anybody and always wanted to say.

Anger is that you wanted something, and somebody prevented you from getting it.
Somebody came as a block, as an obstacle. Your whole energy was going to get something and somebody blocked the energy. You could not get what you wanted.

Now this frustrated energy becomes anger…anger against the person who has destroyed the possibility of fulfilling your desire.